Heavy Duty Trucking, January 2018

JANUARY 2018 HDT 57 WWW TRUCKINGINFO COM provide for a long time The conventional wisdom Poduch explains was that driving at faster speeds would waste fuel But when they crunched the numbers they discovered that drivers could safely travel a little faster on cruise control without sacrificing fuel efficiency And beyond that they started using that data to evaluate whether they actually had the best truck specs for their operation How much engine load are we physically using Do we really need a 450 hp motor or could you accomplish the same thing with 395 hp and different gearing maybe better aerodynamics Poduch says Find hidden opportunities While you may want to start with the simple things the low hanging fruit that can move the needle to mix a few hackneyed business phrases there are gold mines hiding in the data once you start digging For instance McLeods May says many fleets have traditionally looked at revenue per mile but is that really whats driving your business That answers nothing about the expense side of things You dont know if youre getting the best rates the best customers things like that Theres so much more than revenue per mile Pete Allen chief client officer for MiX Telematics says in his experience one area fleets should look at is asset utilization A fleet may not actually realize that 5 of its 100 trucks arent really being used Maybe they could remove that 5 and get a pretty significant cost reduction A couple of new measures that have started to gain popularity in the last few years are velocity distance and velocity revenue May says Velocity distance is the average mph from when a truck picks up a load to when it delivers it If you have a load where the average was 20 mph he says you might decide that it would make more sense to take a different order that averages 50 or 60 mph because its more efficient utilization of your equipment Velocity revenue is the revenue per hour from when the load is picked up to when its delivered how much money is that truck making per hour on that load Youve got to start thinking about not only is it profitable from dollars and sense Daren Lauda general manager of Teletrac Navman North America cites a recent example from a customer Based on the number of warnings coming from the in cab technology he says the fleet thought a particular driver was the worst in the fleet But a closer look at the data showed that nearly all of those warnings were coming on a very specific curve within a half mile of the fleets facility When they actually looked at the data they realized it wasnt that much of a problem at all Looking at a broader example when Minnesota based Kottke Trucking decided a couple of years ago to get more insight into its operation with TCGs Activity Based Costing and Profitability Management Tools it was eye opening says General Manager Kyle Kottke My assumptions about what was winning and losing werent as accurate as I had assumed they would be Particular lanes I assumed would prove to be merited as a cornerstone of our business got altered and changed when it became evident they were not as profitable as once thought Costing software like TCG works with existing TMS programs to allow fleets to drill down into data and analyze profitability reorganize freight lanes focus on operations and give customers justification for rate changes Tom Poduch director of logistics design for Transervice says analyzing data relative to truck speed led the team down some interesting paths The New York based company owns operates and manages more than 24000 pieces of equipment from 126 locations in its full service leasing and dedicated contract carriage business It has used onboard computers and the data they can port from your TMS on revenue by tractor What if we want to follow that number all the way to the dispatcher involved he asks In a traditional TMS he says you would have to take this report and try to manipulate it a lot of ways Tools like Power BI and McLeod IQ allow you to look at the same number with all these different dimensions as a way of further looking at what affects that revenue When you do that he says you might discover that a truck that was producing lowerthan usual revenue had a different dispatcher or a different driver than usual Having different ways of looking at the data might indicate a problem with operations or with the driver or with the equipment itself he says Having that flexibility would allow you to follow the trail of the data to the root cause of why the data changed Youre always looking for your data to help you in figuring out whats going on in the real world Another example is maintenance A traditional report would give you downtime per tractor What if you could now split that downtime by what type of issues were keeping that tractor down and what models were having that downtime Now you might find that Brand X is more likely to have downtime around this particular maintenance issue so then you can act Paredes says The tools themselves dont tell you what to do but the data is not telling you where to act Now you can be more preventive around that particular issue Challenge assumptions Data can also help you learn whether the things you assume are true actually are Todays analytics tools give employees data to help them make better decisions and dig into the data to get a better feel for what makes the key numbers change